Singularity is near.

Ray Kurzweil copes with desktop revolution

In the early 1990s, I was shown a building in Boston which had the words engraved in the dark marble stone boardings above the glas entrance: “We are building a computer that will be proud of us.”

The desktop revolution, driving Moore’s law into every corner and niche of our day by day reality, had only just begun less than a decade earlier.

With the event of singularity, artificial intelligence is aimed to come to the aid as supplement to human intelligence and help resovle the rapid increase and complexity of challenges we are facing. This holds as much danger as it does hold real solutions in never before experienced magnitude. With singularity nearing, real solutions may become reality.

With human mankind being part of nature, we can come to comprehend this development as evolutionary and a natural development. Doubters or pessimists will likely want to discredit and prevent singularity by cornering it in with nazi eugenics.

In the early 1990s, Mathematician and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge was the first to clearly articulate this usage of the term, and begins his essay as follows:Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.

We were moved into the post-digital age by the desktop revolution. What will post-transfomation times hold for us?

Kurzweil writes that, due to paradigm shifts, a trend of exponential growth extends Moore’s law from integrated circuits to earlier transistors, vacuum tubes, relays, and electromechanical computers. He predicts that the exponential growth will continue, and that in a few decades the computing power of all computers will exceed that of human brains, with superhuman artificial intelligence appearing around the same time.